How I Discovered Parajanov

During my November 18 author talk at Emory University for my book The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, someone asked how I got interested in Parajanov’s work. Here is the story in more detail.

I first learned of Parajanov in 1987, when Alan Stanbrook published an article about The Legend of the Surami Fortress for the magazine Sight & Sound. I was intrigued by his description of Parajanov’s films, especially their striking use of color. In 1988, during a course in film analysis taught by Jean Decock at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, we watched excerpts from the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in class and I was completely stunned; it looked like nothing I had seen before, it opened up an entire world.

That same semester, Yuri Illienko visited Las Vegas on his way to screen an unsubtitled print of his long-banned film A Well for the Thirsty (1966) at the San Francisco Film Festival. He was friends with the composer Virko Baley, who was at time the Artistic Director of the Nevada Symphony Orchestra and who composed the score for Illienko’s Swan Lake: the Zone (1989). Illienko spoke to the film analysis class and Baley arranged a for a special screening that evening of A Well for the Thirsty and the first few reels of The Eve of Ivan Kupalo (1968) at the movie theater located inside the Gold Coast casino. Illienko’s films likewise left a tremendous impression.

Later, I saw Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in its entirety in a course on Soviet cinema, and a few years after that I arranged for a special screening of the Armenian release version (the so-called “director’s cut”) of The Color of Pomegranates at the Huntridge Theater with the support of Hart Wegner, the chair of the film department at UNLV. (The screening also would not have happened without the help and encouragement of my late friend, Bruce Ireland.)

Even though Parajanov was recognized as a major figure in world cinema and obviously lived a colorful and dramatic life, at that time there was almost nothing published about him in English, so I decided to enroll in graduate school and devote myself to studying his life and work. I ended up choosing Emory University at the suggestion of David Cook, the chair of their film studies program at that time; he visited UNLV to lecture on Central Asian cinema around the time that I was organizing the screening of The Color of Pomegranates. It has proved quite an adventure, learning multiple languages over the years, doing research in Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine and Russia, and meeting many fascinating people as a result.

About James Steffen

I'm currently the Film Studies and Media Librarian at Emory University in Atlanta. Although my primary passion and expertise is in film, I also love literature, music and other arts.